HYDE PARK — To get into Hyde Park, one used to have to pass author Floyd Dell slaving over manuscripts alongside other writers in converted concession stands from the World’s Columbian Exposition.
“I have returned to my ice-cold studio, where I have built a fire with scraps of linoleum, a piece of wainscoting and an elaborate filing system of four years creation,” Dell wrote of his Hyde Park studio.
Dell and writers like Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser and others occupied a row of studios known as the Artists Colony on 57th Street between Stony Island Avenue and the Metra tracks from 1913 to 1962.
“After the fair there was a growing demand for moderately priced stores and studios for painters, writers and ‘lovers of bohemian life’ — these narrow spaces topped with pagoda-like gables were attractive to rent,” writes Susan O’Connor Davis in her book “Chicago’s Historic Hyde Park.”
The cheap storefronts were built in 1881 as concession stands for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and lacked many basic amenities, according to Davis.
“Although built without heat, electricity or gas, the spaces gradually filled and attracted national attention,” Davis writes.
Dell occupied a former Chinese laundry in 1913 and was soon joined by neighbors author Carl Sandburg, poet Harriet Monroe and editor Margaret Anderson, who introduced poets Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce to many Chicagoans through The Little Review literary magazine.
The group formed the core of a literary renaissance and by the early 1920s many moved out as they gained prominence.
The row of studios remained until 1962, when they were demolished as part of urban renewal, the federal revitalization program that dramatically reshaped the infrastructure neighborhood.
The small strip of 57th Street is now home to the corporate office of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and a University of Chicago dormitory.
The spirit of the Artists Colony lived on after 1962 at the Harper Court Shopping Center, a complex of subsidized storefronts for local artists and craftsmen. The shopping center was demolished in 2008 to make way for a 12-story University of Chicago office tower and a retail development.
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